I started this blog back in September 2004 and named it after my favourite Fall Song.

I first fell for the Fall thanks to my very good friend Robbie Foy who played them continuously on a car journey from Edinburgh to Truro – Palace of Swords Reversed and Bend Sinister three times each I think. A very compelling and persuasive induction and after that I was hooked.

Share this:

Like this:

Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff

With extraordinary access to the Trump White House, Michael Wolff tells the inside story of the most controversial presidency of our time.

The first nine months of Donald Trump’s term were stormy, outrageous – and absolutely mesmerising. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, bestselling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself.

In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:

– What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
– What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
– Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
– Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
– Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
– What the secret to communicating with Trump is
– What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers
Never before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

There are plenty of revelations as indicated in the blurb. It reads like a thriller and is a real page turner, relating story after story of pure awfulness. Whilst there have been plenty of doubts cast about the veracity of some of the detail of some aspects the overall impression of utter and total chaos and a Whitehouse full of largely terrible and/or incompetent individuals (all with very distinctive names) is inescapable. It’s not going to end well.

I kept being reminded of this while reading it:

And this quote was really striking:

The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—“professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.

In addition, one of the most improbably named individuals, Reince Priebus, who spent six months as Trump’s Chief of Staff, and doesn’t come out of it terribly positively, I kept imagining was actually a fictional royal relation of a famous Ian Rankin detective, Prince Rebus. That didn’t help.

Share this:

Like this:

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock.

It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends.

Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

Very different kind of story this. A range of overlapping and inter-related accounts from an extraordinary cast of characters all connected to a band that never quite was in a time and place that seems both real and remote. It’s strange, dark, inventive, sad in some places and very funny in others. Recommended.

Share this:

Like this:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes’ tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant, tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games.

Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the ‘books of chivalry’, this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. On his ‘heroic’ journey Don Quixote meets characters of every class and condition, from the prostitute Maritornes, who is commended for her Christian charity, to the Knight of the Green Coat, who seems to embody some of the constraints of virtue.

Cervantes’ greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, all suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out to encompass the reader, and does not leave the author outside its circle.

One of those BIG books that have been avoiding for decades but finally decided to tackle. And very glad I did. Whilst it does seem to go on forever it is, nevertheless, a consistently smart, clever, funny and really entertaining read throughout. Despite the fact it was written over 400 years go it feels incredibly modern in all sorts of ways including the stories within the story, the self-referential elements and plenty of irony. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are consistently fascinating and complex characters making the narrative thoroughly captivating. It really is worth the effort.